18th-Century Framed Watercolor of Mourning Iris and English Iris

Details

Description

Circle of Georg Dionysius Ehret, Mourning Iris and English Iris
Mid-18th century

Two irises share this eighteenth-century watercolor and bodycolor … Read more Circle of Georg Dionysius Ehret, Mourning Iris and English Iris
Mid-18th century

Two irises share this eighteenth-century watercolor and bodycolor drawing, and they could hardly be more different. The large flower at the top is the mourning iris, Iris susiana, its broad falls netted all over in smoky gray, fawn, and dusky purple, the markings built up in fine hand-stippling that darkens toward a deep velvety throat. Below it a blue English iris opens in clear blue-violet with a yellow-and-white crest and reddish-brown veining. Sword-shaped leaves rise from the base in fluid strokes and soft green washes, a few of the tips withered and twisting, and touches of opaque white and pale blue give the petals their sheen. The plain cream sheet is left without a border, in the manner of the finest botanical drawing of the period.

The composition follows the celebrated one Ehret painted in 1745. The sheet is one leaf of a folded double sheet and is numbered “8” in graphite at the upper right, long hidden under the mount, so it once belonged to a numbered album of botanical drawings before being taken out for framing. It is presented now in an ornate giltwood frame with a dark blue mount, glazed with UV-protective museum glass.

Framed at a little under two feet, it is an easy piece to live with and an easier one to group. Hang it alone above a console or a small chest in an entry or powder room, where the gilt and the deep blue mount do the work, or build a set of botanical sheets up a stair wall or across a dining room. It suits a bedroom over a nightstand, a library, or a garden room, and it sits as comfortably with painted country furniture as with a polished mahogany chest.

Dimensions
Framed:
Height: 22¼ inches (56.5 cm)
Width: 19¼ inches (48.9 cm)
Depth: 1½ inches (3.8 cm)
Sight:
Height: 9 inches (22.9 cm)
Width: 8¾ inches (22.2 cm)

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition
The drawing is in good overall condition, the pigments retaining notable freshness and the bodycolor stable. The sheet shows light age-toning and scattered spots of foxing commensurate with age, with old hinge remnants to the blank conjugate leaf. The sheet has been examined out of the frame; the paper is without watermark.

Historical Context
Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708–1770) was the preeminent botanical illustrator of the eighteenth century. Born in Heidelberg and later settled in England, he worked for the leading naturalists and patrons of the day and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1757. Working most often in watercolor and bodycolor on paper and vellum, he united exact botanical observation with an unusually refined sense of design. The composition recorded here — the mourning iris paired with a blue English iris — is among his memorable iris subjects, the original painting, dated 1745, preserved in the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation.

Ehret’s celebrated designs were repeated and adapted by the accomplished botanical hands working around him, and finely executed watercolor versions of his compositions form a recognized category of eighteenth-century flower drawing. Drawings of this kind were characteristically assembled into bound albums and portfolios for patrons and collectors, and the numbering and folded double-sheet format of the present work are consistent with just such an origin. The mourning iris, Iris susiana, is an Oncocyclus iris long cultivated in Europe and prized since the sixteenth century for the somber gray-and-purple netting of its single large flower; here it is set against the clear blue of the English iris, a pairing that holds both the dramatic and the delicate within a single sheet.

Ref: NY11194A-mrx See less